1999 report warned of possible attacks by hijacked planes

Published: Saturday, May 18, 2002

WASHINGTON (AP)  Two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, an analysis prepared for U.S. intelligence warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorists could hi jack an airliner and fly it into government buildings, such as the Pentagon.

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qai da's Martyrdom Bat talion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high ex plosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the September 1999 report said.

The Bush administration has asserted that no one in government had envisioned a suicide hijacking before it happened.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said the administration was aware of the report prepared by the Library of Congress for the National Intelligence Council, which advises the president and U.S. intelligence on emerging threats. He said the document did not contain direct intelligence pointing toward a specific plot but rather included assessments about how terrorists might strike.

"What it shows is that this information that was out there did not raise enough alarm with anybody," Fleischer said.

Also Friday, new information emerged about a memo from the FBI's Phoenix office in July warning headquarters that a large number of Arabs were training at a U.S. flight school. The memo urged that all flight schools nationwide be checked, but the FBI failed to act on the idea before Sept. 11.

Government officials said Friday that two of the more than half a dozen names the FBI Phoenix office identified in the memo were determined by the CIA after Sept. 11 to have links to al-Qaida.

Officials said the CIA was not shown the memo before Sept. 11 and even if it had, it did not have the intelligence linking the two men to al-Qaida until after the attacks. The FBI checked the names before Sept. 11 but found no bin Laden ties, the officials added.

Former CIA Deputy Direc tor John Gannon, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council when the 1999 report was written, said officials long have known a suicide hijacking was a threat.

"If you ask anybody could terrorists convert a plane into a missile, nobody would have ruled that out," he said.

Democrats and some Re pub licans in Congress raised the volume of their calls to investigate what the government knew before Sept. 11.

"I think we're going to learn a lot about what the government knew," Sen Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said during an appearance in New York. She said she was un aware of the report created in 1999 during her husband's administration.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary and Finance committees, demanded the CIA inspector general investigate the report, which he called "one of the most alarming indicators and warning signs of the terrorist plot of Sept. 11."

The September 1999 report described suicide hijacking as one of several possible retribution attacks that al-Qaida might seek for a 1998 U.S. air strike against bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.

The report noted an al-Qaida-linked terrorist first arrested in the Philippines in 1995 and later convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had suggested such a mission.

"Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters," the report said.

Bush administration officials have repeatedly said no one in government had imagined such an attack.

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that ... they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Thursday.

The report was written by the Federal Research Division, an arm of the Library of Congress that provides research for federal agencies.

"This information was out there, certainly to those who study the in-depth subject of terrorism and al-Qaida," said Robert L. Worden, the agency's chief.

"We knew it was an insightful report," he said. "Then after Sept. 11 we said, 'My gosh, that was in there.' "

Gannon said the 1999 report was part of a broader effort by his council to identify the full range of attack options of U.S. enemies.

"It became such a rich threat environment that it was almost too much for Congress and the administration to absorb," Gannon said. "They couldn't prioritize what was the most significant threat."